Aventures in Yogurt Making

I'm drinking wine again.  I love wine.  Anyway...

I've told you about this book I read called Make the Bread, Buy the Butter.  In it, Tipsy Baker makes her own yogurt and it sounds so easy!  So, I wanted to try it.

It should be said here that I don't actually like yogurt.  I used to like yogurt, on an off, but then I got pregnant and I was sick as a dog, and Rob said "You have to eat something!  Here, eat this yogurt."  He was very insistent about this, and I was so weak from making a human, that I ate the damned yogurt.  Then I threw it right up.  So that was the end of yogurt for a while.  I never really had positive feelings about yogurt again, but then I got sick, and I was on four tons of different antibiotics and Rob thought it would be a good idea for me to eat pro-biotic yogurt to counter act the anti-biotics.  So after he would administer the IV of drugs, he would hand me an Activia and a spoon and say, "You need to eat something. Here, eat this yogurt."  I was so weak from the sickness and the drugs, that I ate the damned yogurt.  Then I threw it right up.

That was the end of yogurt for me, I've never had yogurt again.  Except for frozen yogurt; that goes down easy. 

Which brings me to why I wanted to make my own yogurt, even though I don't like yogurt:

Because of the fore-mentioned adoration for frozen yogurt, I dreamed of getting an ice cream maker and making my own, fresh strawberry frozen yogurt. After reading the fore-mentioned book, I wanted to take it a step further and make my own yogurt and then make frozen yogurt out of it.

I followed the directions to the detail, which included leaving the milk/yogurt concoction in a warm place, like an oven, over night, and, when I woke up, I would have a quart of runny yogurt. Easy!  The first time, I ended up with a bowl of milk.  The third time, I ended up with a bowl of milk, the second time, I decided to take the steps a little further and cool the heated milk mixture in an ice bath, before I stirred in the live cultures and put the whole shebang in the oven over night.  Turns out the ice bath was a big mistake, because it made my favorite glass bowl look like this:

but I bet I still would have ended up with a bowl of milk in the morning.

So, my yogurt making days are over now.  But not my frozen yogurt making days, which I'll get into later.

In the meantime, if your reading this, Tipsy Baker, what did I do wrong?

P.S.  That is not my hand.  Contrary to your assumptions, I do not have hairy man hands.